Scott G. Hall’s quest to find evidence of voter fraud shows how off-book activity fueled campaign to subvert 2020 election.
More than two weeks after the 2020 election, and a day after a statewide audit affirmed Joe Biden’s win in Georgia, a surprisingfigurestepped forward to scrutinize the results.
Scott G. Hall, a bail bondsman from the Augusta area, “has been looking into the election on behalf of the President,” Georgia’s Republican Party chairman told party officials in a Nov. 20 email reviewed by The Washington Post. Hall was doing so, added the state chairman, “at the request of David Bossie,” the Republican operative, onetime deputy Trump campaign manager and chairman of the conservative activist group Citizens United, who is also a relative of Hall’s.
Six weeks later, Hall had the ear of Jeffrey Clark, a senior Justice Department official, according to Atlanta area prosecutors. Hall’s words, delivered in a 63-minute phone call on Jan. 2, carried weight. Clark would later cite the conversation as part of his push to use Justice Department authority to delegitimize the Georgia election, according to testimony and contemporaneous notes gathered by congressional investigators.
A few days later, Hall was part of a cadre of Trump loyalists who allegedly descended on Coffee County, population 43,000, in Georgia to gain access to sensitive election data. He later boasted of his efforts, saying, “we scanned every freaking ballot.”
Hall’s alleged actions are detailed in the indictment brought last month by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, against Hall, Trump and 17 other defendants. The indictment portrays the bondsman, who makes his living by posting bail for defendants in exchange for a fee, as more central to Trump’s efforts to cling to power than previously known.
Hall, 59,emerges as key not only to the alleged breach of voting equipment in remote Coffee County, a secretive effort to turn up evidence of fraud, but also to the plot that played out in Washington to strong-arm states into disregarding the will of voters and thwarting Biden’s win.
The resulting picture makes clear how the wide-ranging campaign to subvert the 2020 election drew in a sprawling web of people with limited experience in election law who nonetheless styled themselves as specialists.Through some combination of faith in Trump’s most outlandish assertions and sheer force of will, these previously unknown players found an audience with some of the president’s most powerful allies and helped shape their scheme.
Hall is perhaps the most vivid example of the way in which the charges in Fulton County reach far beyond Trump lawyers and campaign officials, also sweeping up a pastor and a publicist, and a bail bondsman overcome by emotional loyalty to Trump. “I got up this morning and cried,” Hall told a Georgia Senate panel in December 2020, describing his grief over Trump’s loss. “I literally cried.”
Hall harnessed personal and political connections as the stepbrother of Bossie’s wife and the owner of one of Georgia’s biggest bail bonds businesses to establish himself as a link between little known activists and high-ranking officials in the federal government.
His role, only now coming into fuller view, shows how numerous exhaustive accounts of the events surrounding the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including the investigation by the House select committee that yielded public hearings and a lengthy 800-page report, still have not revealed the full story of what happened in the weeks after the 2020 election. To some, that story remains baffling, nearly three years later.
“To this day I can’t figure out why a bail bondsman would be so deep into pushing election conspiracy theories,” said John Melvin, who was the assistant director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations at the time and met with Hall over Zoom in November 2020, in a meeting that also included the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia. “What big stake does he have in the election? You’re a concerned citizen, sure, but at the end of the day, you’re a bail bondsman. I don’t understand it,” Melvin said.
Neither Hall nor his attorney responded to requests for comment. Bossie, who has not been charged in connection with the election, also did not respond to inquiries. In court last month, Hall pleaded not guilty to charges that included conspiracy to commit election fraud and conspiracy to defraud the state, as well as violation of an anti-racketeering act originally aimed at dismantling organized crime groups. He was released on a $10,000 bond.
Source : WASHINGTONPOST